DANVILLE – Some Valley researchers have made important genetic discoveries…that certain genes can cause developmental brain disorders such as autism and Attention Deficit Disorder. A recent study led by a team of researchers at Geisinger Health System’s Autism & Developmental Medicine Institute identified 17 genes that can cause brain disorders.
Dr. Christa Martin, director and senior investigator at Geisinger’s ADMI and was a guest on WKOK Sunrise talking about the study, “A lot of studies will focus on one particular brain disorder, like autism or epilepsy. For this study what we did that was unique is we took data that had been collected from many different brain disorders such as autism, epilepsy, ADD, schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder. We took cumulative evidence to see which genes were involved in those disorders.”
Dr. Martin explained what they were able to learn from their research, “We looked through literature to see how many patients had been reported with changes in particular genes across the different brain disorders. The more patients in the literature that we found where they had particular genes that were thought to be involved in their brain disorder, then we would build more evidence for linking those genes to causing brain disorders.”
Martin says they estimate that there are hundreds of thousands of genes that cause these brain disorders and through their research at ADMI, they were able to find about 17 more genes that weren’t previously linked to these disorders. You can hear more from Dr. Martin from WKOK Sunrise online at www.wkok.com. (Ali Stevens)
